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How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World
"How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World" is Episode 3 in Season 14. It originally aired on April 10, 1996. Synopsis The episode begins with LeVar in one of his favorite places, which is the kitchen of his cooking friend and cookbook author Curtis Aikens. Curtis tells LeVar to stop crying and LeVar tells him that the onions he is chopping are making him do so. Curtis says that he has cut thousands of onions in his cooking career and he has a trick to keep LeVar from crying while chopping them. When you cut into one, you cause a chemical reaction with the acid from it and your eyes. Sunglasses are an excellent way to not make you cry when you cut some. They act like safety goggles. Another thing you can do is put them in the fridge. When you keep them cold, it doesn't cause the acid to react with your eyes at all. The gases in them contract with the cold. LeVar and Curtis are trying out new recipes for a book Curtis is working on. He puts the chopped onions in the soup pot to saute for a special marinara sauce. Then he and LeVar move on to cutting carrots to add to the onions. As most people know, carrots are good for your eyes. They also have a nutrient in them called beta carotene as well as vitamin A. A chef is kind of like a food scientist. His or her kitchen is his or her laboratory. As LeVar tries to peel a ripe tomato, he gets some on his shirt. Curtis has a trick to doing so that actually works. You put one in a pot of boiling water for a few seconds. The heat expands its skin. After you take it out, put it in some cold water. The water contracts the heat from the tomato and its skin peels off easily. Then the two cooks dice up the peeled tomatoes to add to the sauce recipe. Curtis gets some fresh herbs to add to the sauce. "You can grow your own in your window box or garden anywhere you live," he tells LeVar. While the marinara is cooking, LeVar tries out another recipe. He is going to make some apple raisin muffins. He finds all the ingredients for them. He tells the viewers, "It's a good idea to use the best ingredients for your recipes in order for them to taste great." In the title book, a cook goes beyond her pantry to find the ingredients for her apple pie recipe when she finds that the grocery store is closed. LeVar states that cooking is a science. A good cook should know how to follow a recipe for weighing, stirring, and measuring and to make sure that everything is perfectly balanced. Chemistry and cooking have so much in common. There are many laboratories where scientists are whipping up new foods all the time. Debbie Herr is a food scientist who creates new ice cream flavors. Some of her work is to find healthier ingredients for her creations. She also does quality control in her job to be sure that everything is in the food products. Back in the kitchen, LeVar shows the viewers the marinara sauce he and Curtis made with the vegetables they chopped. Together, all the ingredients blend in to make such a delicious sauce. They are going to put it in another recipe that they will work on: lasagna. Curtis, yet again, has a trick for making it which might work. He will be using rice in place of noodles for a cooking experiment. All they have to do is use equal amounts of rice and spinach. When you cook the former in water, it expands. When you cook the latter, which is mostly water, it cooks away. They will also be using mozzarella cheese for the lasagna. LeVar asks Curtis where his cooking ideas come from. He says that he get them from his mom. He says that he loves to read, but believe it or not, he never learned to do so until age 26. Of course, he went to school, graduated from high school, and went to college. It was his friendly personality and talents that helped him through school. Even his parents didn't know that he never learned to read. It took time for him to finally learn to do so. Now that he can, he enjoys reading books and even writing them. Learning to read was his biggest dream of his life. After they finish preparing the lasagna, he and LeVar put it in the oven. The lasagna and muffins are ready to take out of the oven. Now that all the recipes are performed, there's one more test that LeVar and Curtis must do to see if they succeeded: tasting them! LeVar claims that all kitchens are labs where experiments that fail and succeed happen every day. Curtis lets him taste the food to see how it came out. He says that the cooking experiments were a big success. Review Books *The Edible Pyramid: Good Eating Every Day *The Kids' Around the World Cookbook *What Food is This? Category:Season 14 Category:Episodes